In a meeting with senior Japanese Foreign Ministry intelligence officials, [Randall Fort, head of the US State Department Intelligence and Research Bureau] urged his counterparts to tap the ”underutilised assets” represented by the global network of Japanese businesses.

”Japan, with its economic and diplomatic presence in countries like Iran, could draw on insights that would be of great interest to the United States,”

Japan had a ”unique opportunity” to collect intelligence inside Iran where the US had no embassy, he argued.

”Any diplomatic or intelligence reporting Japan received from Iran, no matter how seemingly mundane, would be extremely valuable to us.”

However, Japan’s poor control over its information security left the US and Australia cold (this was a time when the MSDF were losing data to Chinese honeytraps and computer file-sharers). Indeed, Japan’s lax security are often blamed for Chinese military developments by security otaku in Japan.

It is unclear to what extent this intelligence exchange grew and how well it survived Prime Minister Shinzo Abe (assuming it was his initiative – he showed interest in bilateral security exchanges and the beefing up of Japanese intelligence).